Darul Aman palace and Amanullah's new Kabul

At a glance

• Darulaman (Dar ul-Aman, "abode of peace") was the new capital King Amanullah Khan planned a few miles south-west of Kabul after independence. A law on building the city is dated 19 Asad 1302 (10 August 1923). [4]

• The palace at its centre is a three-storey neoclassical building 33 metres high, designed first by a French architect and then detailed by a German team under Walter Harten, who reached Kabul in October 1926. [2]

• It was almost finished when the risings of 1928 to 1929 drove Amanullah out. It was never the parliament it was built to be. [2]

• It burned on 14 December 1968, on 27 December 1979 and in March 1990, was shelled in the war for Kabul in the 1990s, and was hit by an American bomb in 2001. [2]

• Between 2016 and 2019 Afghan engineers and workers rebuilt it, and President Ashraf Ghani opened it for the centenary of independence on 19 August 2019. [9–11]

A city for a new Afghanistan

Mariam Ghani and Ashraf Ghani, writing in 2012 before he became president, call Dar ul-Aman both "the district imagined by Amanullah as his ideal 'new city'" and the palace that "was to be its center". [2] They add that, for Afghans, the palace "has always symbolized the unfinished project of which it was both the most visible and smallest part". [2] The project followed from the independence won in 1919, told in Amanullah Khan: independence, reform and the crisis of 1929.

Vartan Gregorian, an Armenian-American historian of Afghanistan, writes that Amanullah, "like Abdur Rahman and Sher Ali", was excited by the idea of a new capital, a "metropolis" near Kabul. [3] When the first stone of Dar ul-Aman was laid, he declared that a healthy town depended on the laws of hygiene, and that clean streets and pure water were essential. [3] The law on the city's construction, the Nizamnamah-ye Abriyah-ye Shahr-e Dar-ul-Aman, is dated 19 Asad 1302, 10 August 1923. [4]

A railway came first. The Kabul station was small, and Gregorian says a track was set out between Kabul and Dar ul-Aman, to be extended later to Jalalabad. [3] On 15 December 1922 The Locomotive reported a railway being laid for about six miles from Kabul to the site of the new city, with some of the rolling stock made in the Kabul workshops. [5] Three small steam locomotives came from Henschel of Kassel. [5] In August 1928 the same magazine called it the only railway in Afghanistan, five miles long. [5] The tracks went out of use after Amanullah fell, and the locomotives later stood in the Kabul museum yard at Darulaman. [5] In 2002 the museum's caretaker, Omara Khan Masoudi, said of them: "These are historical artefacts and we want to keep them." [5]

French plans and a German team

Who drew the palace is told in layers. The Ghanis write that a French architect drew up the original plans, and that after Germany and Afghanistan exchanged diplomats the mayor of Berlin sent Walter Harten and a team of twenty-two architects and town planners to Kabul in October 1926. [2] Harten's team took over the planning of the district, including the detailed specification of the palace. [2] It would be 33 metres high, with 5,400 square metres on each floor. The big oval theatre on the third floor was meant for the Majlis, the parliament, and the first floor, facing the great road, for the king's offices, his secretaries and the court ministries. [2]

Germans were already at work before Harten. Wilhelm Rieck of Berlin was in Kabul in 1923 and was in charge of the electrical installations, in particular at the palace. [5] His great-grandson's family website says he travelled to Afghanistan in 1922 and publishes his photographs. [1] Leon Poullada, an American diplomat and historian, summed up the buildings as "the product of first-class French architects and German engineers", all paid for out of Afghanistan's own resources. [4]

Extravagance or pride

Amanullah's critics called the building of the new capital extravagant. W. K. Fraser-Tytler, a British officer and writer, said large sums went on aeroplanes that would not fly and on furnishing the "great new capital" while essential services were starved. [4] Poullada found "a bit of bias, a bit of misinformation, and a bit of half-truth" in such comments. He judged that a backward country needed "a psychological boost" and that Afghans "still point to them with pride". [4] He notes that The Times of London praised the conception and the architectural quality of the new capital on 15 February 1928. [4] Poullada also records an informant in Kabul in 1967 who said Amanullah's tax reforms brought relief to most taxpayers. [4] How far the cost fed the revolt is argued in the article on Amanullah.

The halt of 1929 and the palace's many uses

Dar ul-Aman, the Ghanis write, "was almost completed when a rural rebellion forced Amanullah into exile in 1929". [2] Stripes reporter J. P. Lawrence puts it the same way, work that stopped at the end of the decade when Amanullah's reign was cut short. [11] The parliament it was built for never sat there. The story of the rising and of Nadir Khan's return is in Mohammad Nadir Shah and Hashim Khan and Shah Mahmud Khan.

The Ghanis list what the building became: Kabul University's medical school, a store for raisins, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Public Works, the Ministry of Justice and the Supreme Court, the General Staff building and the Ministry of Defence. Later came a mujahidin base, a refugee camp and housing for resettled nomads. [2] The Kabul museum was also at Dar ul-Aman in the years of Hashim Khan's government. Gregorian says it held the finds of the French archaeological mission, which worked from 1922 to 1946. [3] The BBC adds that the palace housed the Ministry of Defence in the 1970s and 1980s. [8]

Three fires

The palace burned three times in the twentieth century, on 14 December 1968, 27 December 1979 and 7 March 1990. [2] The official newspaper Islah reported the first. The fire began in the early afternoon and burned until 12:30 the next morning, concentrated on the third floor, where the roads, dams, canals, administration and engineering departments of the Ministry of Public Works were housed. The prime minister, "expressing great sadness", ordered the building restored at once. [2] In the city, the Ghanis write, people whispered that the ruling dynasty, which was hostile to Amanullah, had sabotaged it. An inquiry found some low-ranking officials guilty, and official records do not say why they would set fire to their own workplace. [2] The BBC dates the restoration to 1969. [8]

The 1979 fire is the one that links the palace to the Tajbeg palace on the hill above it. On 27 December Soviet special forces took Dar ul-Aman on their way to kill President Hafizullah Amin at Tajbeg, and grenades they threw started the fire. [2] The killing is told in Hafizullah Amin. The fire of 1990 followed the failed coup of Defence Minister Shahnawaz Tanai, who launched it from the palace with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-e Islami. Rockets fired by government troops loyal to Najibullah set the building alight. [2] See Mohammad Najibullah.

The war for Kabul and after

When the mujahidin parties fought over the capital in the early 1990s, the Ghanis write, Dar ul-Aman became both base and target. [2] Xinhua was told in 2019 that about 60 per cent of the palace's 150 rooms was destroyed in the factional fighting. [10] The story of those years is in Civil war and the Taliban emirate, 1992–2001 and, for the city itself, Kabul and its Pashtuns. In the battle to take Kabul from the Taliban in 2001, a US bomb went through all three floors and left a crater in the centre. [2, 11]

The walls kept what fighters wrote on them. The Ghanis copied lines from the corridors: "O mujahid, adopt the way of battle", a second hand's "Gulbuddin is a national traitor", and the exchange "As long as there is a battle, we will be steadfast" and "You will battle as long as there is money to keep you going." [2] When the BBC photographed the ruin in 2014 the front was still almost intact, with bullet marks and the graffiti "Death to the infidels" on one wall. [8]

The ruin stayed in use and in danger. On 15 April 2012, when the Taliban attacked the diplomatic quarter and parliament, they listed the ruined palace among their targets. [7] Pajhwok reported on 14 April 2012 that Helmand's traders and governor had begun a donation drive. The traders' union head, Ali Ahmad Nasiri, said they had given 500,000 afghanis, and Governor Mohammad Gulab Mangal gave 100,000, bringing the Helmand total to 1.068 million afghanis and 4,200 dollars. [6] Mangal said "only the Kabul Municipality is trying to collect donations for the Darul Aman Palace" and asked rich people across the country to help revive historical sites. [6]

Rebuilding, 2016 to 2019

The Ghanis ended their 2012 essay with the line "Until the unfinished project is finished, Amanullah's ghost will linger, haunting another century with what might have been". [2] Ghani called the palace "the Palace of Abandoned Dreams" a few years before he ordered its restoration in 2016. [11] The work followed the original plans and used stone from the quarry of the 1920s. [11]

Javid Hammad, who ran the project, told AFP in August 2019 that construction began in earnest in March 2018 after the designs were settled, with about 500 workers on site, cedar from Kunar and marble from Herat. [9] He told Xinhua that work began in 2016 and that every engineer and worker was an Afghan. [10] The cost is given differently. Xinhua quotes him as saying the government allocated 20 million dollars and his team spent 10 million, AFP gives 10.5 million, and the New York Times and Tolo News estimated 16 to 20 million. [9–11]

Afghans did not agree about it. A Kabul shopkeeper, Ali, told AFP it was good to rebuild but the money would have been better spent on people's problems. Ghulam Mohammad said the ruin should have stayed as it was "so people can remember how brutal the war was". [9] Xinhua noted that some in the country wanted the bitter outcome of the war shown to future generations. [10] Hammad answered: "The message of the Darulaman Palace is a message of peace, security, brotherhood and coexistence." [9]

President Ghani was to inaugurate the palace on 19 August 2019, the centenary of the treaty that ended the third war with Britain. [9] On that date the plan was to give the first and second floors to a national cultural museum and the third to the presidency as a guesthouse, though AFP said its final use was not settled. [9, 10] The Stripes report calls it unveiled in 2019, and on Independence Day in 2020 the historian Habibullah Rafi said at the palace that it was "a symbol of Afghans' unity, resistance, independence and sacrifices". [11] By then it had also served briefly as an isolation facility for coronavirus patients. [11]

What the palace means

Afghan voices give the palace different meanings. For the Ghanis it is the unfinished project of a state that still had literacy, rule of law and independence to win. [2] For Hammad it carries a message of peace. [9] For Rafi it stands for unity, resistance and independence. [11] For the shopkeeper it is a matter of money better spent, and for Ghulam Mohammad a ruin worth keeping as a record of the war. [9]

The building has been through the fall of its founder, three fires, the shelling of the 1990s and a bomb, and it was rebuilt by Afghans on the same hill for the centenary of independence. [2, 9–11]